I don’t care if people choose to have more children, so long as they take responsibility for providing for them and raising them. Any government law, tax, etc. which punishes or encourages more or less children is anti-freedom.

The arguments against the Malthusians which I have read basically compare the predicitons with the current data, so we can all laugh. Of those sources I can recall, none of them were religious in nature, or “right wing” by any reasonable measure.

You need to get out more. Seek out authors who are rational who express skepticism and criticism of whatever you take as common wisdom. Ignore the religious knee-jerkers.

I’m willing to entertain the notion that some of the Malthusians have ulterior motives because I damn near know for a fact that some of their adversaries on the right have ulterior motives. I stress some, not all, but at the same time most of the noise on the right with respect to population comes from the asshat contingent.

These are generally the same people who insist on imposing their sick sexual neuroses and geopolitical paranoia on the public at large, e.g., Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. On the be-fruitful-and-multiply right, there’s a lot of common cause between the deeply repressed and resentful fringe of Catholic natural family planning zealots, the Mormon manifest destiny set and the Baptist/evangelical quiverfull breeders. It’s not uncommon to hear politicians, preachers or public intellectuals from this coalition speak approvingly of the fact that their followers are raising more children for the war (sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal) against Islam and/or atheistic hedonism.

In my more cynical moments I’ve wondered whether one of the reasons for the Catholic Church’s positions against birth control and in support of reckless breeding is to raise more children for the pleasure of pedophile priests. It’s a sick and disturbing thought, but I can’t imagine a much more positive gloss being put on simultaneous campaigns by an institution to suppress sexuality among its happily and willfully married couples and to harbor and obstruct justice on behalf of known sexual predators in its clergy. At the same time, the desire to raise more children in order to more readily go to war at a time when the US is killing and maiming the best of its youth in pursuit of dubious objectives abroad (more often an old line Protestant or nondenominational goal than a Catholic one) is equally hideous on examination, just in a different way from the pedophile priest scandal.

For the record, I joined the Catholic Church in spite of this sickness, not because of it. I may have been too optimistic about the Church’s ability or willingness to move beyond its more stupid and destructive obsessions.

One thing I can say for sure is that I’m awfully sick of the insinuations that the childless are that way because they hate children and families. Of course the Catholic clergy and religious are exempted from this critique because they (ostensibly) aren’t having illicit sexy time, a situation that makes the scolding all the more ridiculous but also all the more scary because people actually put credence in it.

It has become painfully clear to me that regardless of the underlying virtue of the practices being advocated, once matters of sex and childrearing become politicized it’s time for reasonable people of goodwill to cry foul. Loudly. The zealots on both sides are prone to thrash around like bulls in a china shop, with no regard for the amount of collateral damage that they cause in the pursuit of their monomaniacal goals. A decent society confronts such people.

All the same, it’s no wonder that so many reasonable people of goodwill disengage from the political system when they see what an intractable mess the crazies have made of it. The loudest, most influential factions in many debates clearly have no interest in compromise, consensus or the commonweal. All they want to do is foam and spit venom at their adversaries.

If the global temperature continues to increase, then in 50 years people will likely be adapting to the change, as they have done throughout history. Sea walls may protect coastal cities. Russia and Canada will enjoy a bounty of riches as warmer temperatures will benefit them. People will watch documentaries and clip shows showing predictions from today, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Even better, if natural forces cause global temperatures to go into a cooling cycle, Canada will miss out on the benefits of warming, and people will still laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Drew didn’t invite criticism just by quoting McKibben. The picture of that house is misleading, particularly since he explicitly labeled it “420 sq ft house.” My guess is that the original publishers of the picture specified that it showed the house configured for transportation and touted the ease with which it could be expanded to size; I’ve seen much the same thing in the likes of the Whole Earth Catalog.

I don’t believe that the manner in which Drew presented the house picture can be reasonably construed as hyperbolic artistic license, a reductio ad absurdum, or satire. Everything else about this post and his previous Agitator posts (with the exception of the Traficant post, perhaps) is too earnest for that. Incorporating that sort of exaggeration into an obviously satirical post would be fine, but incorporating it into a strident, earnest broadside is intellectually dishonest. Drew clearly lured his readers in with an unironic expression of outrage, so it’s completely reasonable for his readers to expect that his outrage be grounded in empirical facts, or at least reasonable observations, rather than half-cocked prejudices or visual sleights of hand. I have no way to know whether he mislabeled the house picture on purpose or out of sloppiness, but in either event it was poor journalism, so of course he has been called out on it.

To put it another way, there’s a difference between P.J. O’Rourke taking liberties with the facts and John Stossel taking liberties with the facts. In this case, Drew is clearly channelling Stossel.

This isn’t the first time that Drew has walked into a firestorm by resorting to dubious sources. The flak that he took a few weeks ago for using an atrocious screed in the Daily Caller as the basis for a critique of government dependency was even more deserved than what he’s taking for this piece.

I guess the upshot is that, regardless of who writes it, partisan hackwork doesn’t go uncriticized around here. I certainly wouldn’t have challenged Drew so aggressively if he had used better sources and been more meticulous in his writing.

As for the picture, I think Drew dared to tweak the state-sponsored Religion of the Moment by illustrating his point with an obviously ‘not 420 sq. ft.’ microshack. Humorous exaggeration on a BLOG?!? On the INTERNET??? My God…..The Horror…

On closer examination, it appears that it has a folding ceiling, allowing it to be collapsed for easy transport (as shown in the picture, with the house riding on a noncommercial travel trailer) and expanded to size on site. It appears that its real footprint once assembled is more than three times its travel size. I also know from personal experience that a 420 sq. ft. studio is a lot bigger than the house shown above; I’ve stayed with friends in studios of about that size, and I’ve lived in studios that were between 500 and 600 sq. ft.

In point of fact, after full assembly this house is NOT the equivalent of a garden shed perched on a household travel trailer. It’s small, but not remotely that small. Insinuating that it is is intellectually dishonest.

Drew, it’s no wonder that you’re getting hosed in the comment threads.

China is probably going to build the next generation of UK reactors because they REALLY don’t give a **** about NIMBY’s, and are building tens of GW’s of nuclear power this decade alone.

(Also, bluntly, having a Queen? Is a cheap way of ensuring that there’s ONE head of Government, who is elected. Nice tourist attraction, too – that’s the sum impact of the Monarchy on me)

@46 – Certainly. But that requires, first, a way to raise capital separate from the current bank system…

Kevin Carson (#46): “…could easily achieve something like a Factor Four reduction in energy consumption with an increase in quality of life.“

Except the quality of life, as with all values, is a personal determination. You give your dream of “walkable communities”, which is fine for some people. But other people prefer the freedom to get into a car and go where they want, to drive hours to see family and friends or to have fun. For them, the quality of life will be lower if the central planners decree that they live according to some anti-car blueprint. And, to force such a plan means to violate the rights of individuals, instead of allowing them to choose their own values.

All debates about political systems tend to devolve into each side contrasting the worst case of their opponents’ system with the best case for theirs. On this basis Monarchy does rather well; in the best case you have someone running things who was raised from infancy to do the job. In the worst case you only have to shoot one idiot to change the government.

Which doesn’t mean I want to live under a monarchy.

shortening supply and distribution chains and scaling production at a local level where that’s more efficient than the state-subsidized gigantism and centralism we have now;

replacing the state-subsidized car culture we have now with mixed use development and walkable communities;

low-cost passive solar heating and cooling techniques;

cogeneration and recycling of waste heat;

intelligent systems design of the kind Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins describe, that optimizes the efficiency of systems as a whole at an actual cost reduction rather than optimizing each step…

…could easily achieve something like a Factor Four reduction in energy consumption with an increase in quality of life.

Whatever “green” said the half-witted measures you listed above would be necessary to reduce our ecological footprint (or whatever right-winger compiled the crudely caricatured strawman — George Reisman???) is a technological ignoramus.

I started with a statement by the short story writer Saki (H.H. Munro) who had one of his characters call health food faddists (of the Edwardian era) people who “have an instinct for being unhappy, highly developed.”. To that I added the word Ostentatiously, which in this age of various pious twits flaunting their adherence to this or that Cause, is severely under-used.

Elliot & Leon Wolfeson,

One of the reasons that I despise the “Alternative Energy” crowd is there complete detachment from any realistic benchmark; they want pie in the sky, now. They are, consequently, unwilling to seriously examine the actual casualty list for Three Mile Island, and compare it to, say, the yearly casualty list for mining the coal necessary to replace TMI. Or, for that matter, the expected casualty list from the window-washers necessary to keep a 1,000 kilowatt solar farm clean enough to function.

So few people really want to look at the actual numbers; sometimes because they aren’t good with numbers but more often (I fell, anyway) because actually looking at the numbers won’t forward their agenda or highlight their Political Piety.

I, BTW, would be happy to have a nuclear generator in my back yard, on the proviso that I got my electricity free. If radiation was going to mess with my life, the fact that my Father spent WWII refining uranium for the Manhattan Project would have rendered the issue moot.

Leon Wolfeson (#42): “Ah right. YOU are a NIMBY, who whines and prevents solutions.“

Quite the opposite. I simply point out that, since TMI, the environmentalists and NIMBYs don’t allow new nuclear power plants to be built. Yet, they whine about coal and oil, when nuclear plants have clean emissions. Sure, there’s the waste, which is a trade off. But blocking coal and nuclear energy is economic suicide.

“You care about raising prices on the poor, because what are they gonna do? Not have heating? A typical Corporatist Capitalist answer.“

Clearly, you misunderstood my comment to be an endorsement, rather than a criticism. I have discussions with people who struggle to pay their bills who think it’s wonderful that Obama and the Democrats are punishing those bad old wascally oil companies. They just don’t have a clue that when the Democrats/greens hamstring energy, their utility bills are going to double, triple, or worse. Not to mention the cascading inflation of everything else, like groceries, since it takes energy to produce and transport food, and to light and cool a store.

I think he was commenting on the status of nuclear power generation development in the US and the reasons behind it, not that he was personally against it.

You care about raising prices on the poor, because what are they gonna do? Not have heating? A typical Corporatist Capitalist answer.

Leon Wolfeson (#37): “Yes, it’s so terrible that radical anti-science activists on this topic get far more than the airtime which the 0.6% or so of climate scientists who disagree with AGW deserve.“

What are you watching? I’m not even talking about “airtime” but about printed news and academic debates. Perhaps I’m missing some of that because I don’t bother to watch politicians who deny global warming entirely (nevermind whether it is anthropogenic), who (in my limited observation) also tend to deny evolution and make ridiculous arguments based upon religious ignorance and bigotry. Just as I turn off the TV when Obama comes on. I’ll read about what he or the religious right nuts say, but it’s too irritating to me to spend time watching them.

“Never mind that it’s quite possible to radically cut emissions…by building nuclear power plants.“

Not in the US. Three Mile Island. Done.

“We have the answers, but not the political will to USE them.“

Don’t say “we”. That’s the Fallacy of the Collective. I am not interested in political “answers” because they always come at the price of individual rights. I’m certainly interested in free market solutions. When the technology makes something profitable, people don’t need tax subsidies to do it. When it isn’t, the carpet baggers will rake in the tax dollars all day long, while progress takes a back seat to cronyism.

Susan (#29): “Please tell me about the ‘Magic of the Marketplace’ and the ‘Invisible Hand’. I’d like to learn more about that religion.“

For people who understand the free market as an ethical end, rather than a “system” in comparison to the other systems of controlling the economic exchanges of others through force, such metaphors are counterproductive. Those terms are used by proponents of capitalism who mindlessly repeat such nonsense, or by anti-capitalists who would rather pick on a straw man than on the fundamental principle of freedom.

The free market is not a system by which to rule others. It’s the lack of a system. It’s not magic. There is no hand, invisible or otherwise, greater than the hands of individuals making choices to interact with others peaceably and for mutual benefit. Also, there are no guarantees. Anyone who guarantees success is either scamming you, or using other people’s money to accomplish the goal. And, you know what they say about using other people’s money.